Captain Digital

Random musings on politics, society, and pop culture from the Internet's marketing curmudgeon.

Life is just a Bowl (Game) of Cherries…

I like football. Not exactly your garden-variety, Earth-shattering confession. Perhaps I should ellaborate. I enjoy watching football. In my younger days, I used to enjoy playing some sandlot games at parties, largely because as a 6’4″, 200+ lb. guy, I was fast enough to knock a quarterback or two on their lower posterior regions. Never played ball in High School (broken bones being a potential career-ender for musicians) or college (never took it seriously, nor did I go a school that had an NCAA team). Nonetheless, I enjoy watching the game, but you’d hardly call me a fanatic. I follow the Cowboys and UT, and try to keep up with LSU, and that’s about it. Watched the Fiesta Bowl tonight, and was struck by a couple of things…

  • Colt McCoy is a pretty amazing quarterback.
  • It was a trip, watching Jimmy Johnson and Barry Switzer sitting next to each other in the Fox studio, and having to pretend not to loath each other.
  • The second half of the game was really exciting (the first half, not so much).
  • UT deserves to be playing for the National championship.
  • The BCS system is a complete joke. [Read more…] about Life is just a Bowl (Game) of Cherries…

A Tale of Two Satires.

Over the weekend, I rented a slew of movies for me and my family. (It beat contending with the drunks and nutjobs on the road for a meaningless New Year’s celebration. When we rent movies, we get some for my daughter that we can watch as “family fare,” one that I can enjoy as a “guy thing” (in this case, Death Race), and a couple that Mrs. Digital and I can enjoy when our daughter is asleep. I chose a couple that looked promising, War, Inc. with John Cusack, and the Cohen Brothers Burn After Reading. Being a card-carrying conservative, I’m used to having to put up with movies that espouse a liberal/secular/progressive point of view, and movies that hit you over the head with their liberal’s-eye view of the world. I’m resigned to having to filter out the liberal subtexts, and laugh off the obvious, ham-handed attempts to make conservatives look stupid/incompetent/lazy/criminal. It’s not fair. I don’t like it. And I wish they wouldn’t do it. But I’m resigned to it. Having said all that, allow me to compare and contrast these two satirical flicks for your edification. [Read more…] about A Tale of Two Satires.

Happy New Year.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m not going to shed a tear that 2008 is one for the history books tonight. Been a rough year, any way you slice it. Enough said. It’s time to look forward, and not agonize over the immediate past.

To all the readers of this blog, may you have a happy and prosperous new year, filled with success, security, and sanity, in an insane world.

Godspeed…

500 Channels…and not a thing to watch.

I’m sitting here, ’round midnite, and there’s not a thing interesting on television to watch. Part of that has to do with the doldrums between Christmas and New Years – all the good specials have been aired, and broadcasters are loathe to waste good programming, when a majority of the public is on vacation. Unfortunately for me, we’re stuck here. With nothing to watch.

It occurs to me that it’s pretty amazing – the odds on that. While I like to think I’m a fairly discriminating viewer, I’m not THAT hard to please…I like SciFi, thrillers, whodunits, Westerns, spy flicks, comedies – you name it. Still I don’t see a lot that interests me, other than a couple of flicks I’ve seen umpteen times, and don’t care to see again.

So the question is – Why? Why can’t we have better quality programming, now that we live in a world with so many choices?

When I was a kid, we had three channels – ABC, NBC, and CBS. There was a communal aspect to television…without VCRs or DVRs, you were forced to watch it when it aired. All my peer group watched the same shows, and if you didn’t, you were (at least the next day) a social misfit. Then came Betas and VHS, followed by recordable DVDs and DVRs.

Still, that fails to answer the question, why is so much of what’s on so bad. I’d love to say that it’s really the bell-shaped curve – that there’s the same proportion of great-to-dreck as with anything else. I’m not buying it. I’d describe about 80% of what’s on as “crapalicious” at best, an insult to my intelligence at worst.

My theory? It’s easier to condition people to accept junk, than to work harder to make things better.

If that sounds cynical, then so be it. Most of television is just so much effluvia. We deserve better. Especially after midnight.

What’s important. And what’s not.

At this time of year, many of us get all wrapped up (read: “obsessed”) with the trappings of Christmas, especially the gifts – both giving and receiving. That’s all well and good, I suppose, but you might be surprised how little it takes to pull you back down to reality. Take, for instance, a health scare from someone you love.

Now I’m not going to get into specifics here, largely because the person in question values their privacy above just about all else, and wouldn’t want me trumpeting about their illness. So I won’t. I will say that something like this came as a real jolt, and if I didn’t have my priorities straight before, I certainly do now. [Read more…] about What’s important. And what’s not.

Resolutions.

I hate resolutions. You either want to do something or you don’t. I see no reason to wait for some arbitrary and capricious date to make some life-changing decision or to implement some behavior. However, as tradition and public opinion are decidedly against me, here are my resolutions:

  • I resolve to eat less and work out more.
  • I resolve to work smarter and not harder. 
  • I resolve to take as much pressure off my wife as possible. 
  • I will try to be  less sarcastic and more understanding.
  • I will try to be more efficient, and…
  • I resolve to stop making stupid lists, resolutions I likely won’t keep, and making resolutions just because it’s expected of me. 

Or not.

Billboard logic.

I was driving down the street here in Amarillo (Centrally Located Between Two Oceans!™) the other day, and spied a billboard for the U.S. Border Patrol. The board promised an exciting career in law enforcement keeping our borders safe for legal immigrants and travelers, and keeping the illegal aliens out.

Pause with me for a nanosecond, and let’s consider what they’re asking. [Read more…] about Billboard logic.

Merry ChristmaKwanzakaFestiMas?

Look. I’ve had enough. The politically correct crowd, the rabid atheists, and the secular progressives can all go hang themselves. Here’s the deal: Christmas is, by its very definition, a CHRISTIAN holiday. Period.

The word “Christmas” comes from “Christ Mass” – the sacrament of Holy Communion, said to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. No more. No less. In the intervening years since Christ walked the Earth, many traditions regarding this celbration have arisen. Some are appropriate. Some less so. (For those that insist that Christ would not approve of celebrating His birth at all, I wonder just how thrilled Jesus really is, to see the instrument of his torture and death celebrated as his own symbol. I mean, I get the “triumph over death” idea, but seriously…if you’d been put to as painful a death as could be imagined, I’m pretty sure you’d have at least an involuntary twitch every time you saw a cross. But, I digress…) [Read more…] about Merry ChristmaKwanzakaFestiMas?

Flying blind…

I recently (four days ago, to be exact) updated the software this blog runs on, to the latest and greatest version – i.e., WordPress v.2.7. The upgrade was surprisingly easy to do, and by all appearances, went off without a hitch. Um…ALMOST without a hitch. Seems that one of the things that got trashed along the way was the settings for my Google Analytics code. Whoops.

I usually check my GA stats on a daily basis, just to see what’s going on. Check more often, and it will drive you nuts. Less frequently, and you stand to miss a trend…or a problem.

It had been four days since I’d checked my GA account. Color me “surprised” to learn that I’d (according to GA) gone from a significant readership to ZERO hits for the last four days. That’s like going from 60 to zero in, oh, about 0.0 seconds.

Once I saw the stats, I knew something was wrong. I dialed up the New! Improved! control panel, and found that my GA settings were pooched. No code – no tracking. No tracking – no results. No results – unhappy blogger.

I’ve restored the tracking code, and all should be right in my world.

But I’ll keep checking. As Joe Bob Briggs (Drive-In Movie Critic of Grapevine, Texas) says, “Without eternal vigilance, it can happen here.”

CSS Hell.

If, as Voltaire once opined, “God is a comedian, playing to an audience afraid to laugh,” then CSS (Cascading Style Sheets for you non-nerds in the audience) were written by Geeks as some kind of convoluted “you can’t get there from here” joke on the rest of us. I’m sure God finds it funny. I don’t. 

Back when the World (Wide Web) was young, all you needed to create websites was a copy of Notepad, a copy of Photoshop, and nerves of steel. Creating anything past the simlest of pages was a study in frustration. Editing or updating a page was worse. Torture. Client requests to “make all the body copy one point larger” could make the strongest web geek’s blood run cold. Make strong men cry. Turn weaker men to ashes. You get the picture. 

Then along came CSS. The promised land for web designers – style sheets, where you could divorce the data from the style elements. Create the pages once, then change one line of code in a style sheet and watch the changes ripple through the other pages, as if my magic. 

That was the promise. The reality is something else. [Read more…] about CSS Hell.